were a passion, as to Wordsworth. The landscape art thus founded, and
continued by the Japanese in the fifteenth century, must rank as
the greatest school of landscape which the world has seen. It is the
imaginative picturing of what is most elemental and most august in
Nature--liberating visions of storm or peace among abrupt peaks,
plunging torrents, trembling reed-beds--and though having a fantastic
side for its weakness, can never have the reproach of pretty tameness
and mere fidelity which form too often the only ideal of Western
landscape."

Great Chinese artists unite in dismissing fidelity to outline as of
little importance compared with reproduction of the spirit of the object
painted. To paint a tree successfully, it is necessary to produce not
merely shape and colour but the vitality and "soul" of the original.
Until with the last two or three centuries, nature itself was always
appealed to as the one source of true inspiration; then came the artist
of the studio, since which time Chinese art has languished, while
Japanese art, learned at the feet of Chinese artists from the fourteenth
century onwards, has come into prominent notice, and is now, with
extraordinary versatility, attempting to assimilate the ideals of the
West.

The following words were written by a Chinese painter of the fifth
century:--

"To gaze upon the clouds of autumn, a soaring exaltation in the soul; to
feel the spring breeze stirring wild exultant thoughts;--what is there
in the possession of gold and gems to compare with delights like these?
And then, to unroll the portfolio and spread the silk, and to transfer
to it the glories of flood and fell, the green forest, the blowing